In this issue of the NEL you will find the paper by Professor
by Marek Pawlikowski Dehumanization of Contemporary Medicine:
Causes and Remedies. This is a significant reminder of humanistic
values not only in medicine but in all fields of science and
art.
We
can see this recognition as more and more Universities throughout
the world are adopting ’Science & Art’ in their
curriculums. This trend has been shown consistently in this
Journal as well as in our sister publication The International
Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Medicine
from their very beginnings. This synthesizing of Science with
Art also mirrors the inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary
approaches characterizing these two journals.
As
we have often mentioned in our Editorials over the last three
years, it is not possible to divide science from art nor art
from science. Historically, it has been the artists (writers,
poets, painters etc) who emphasized the humanistic touch to
the scientific issues. Reading Marek Pawlikowski’s Guest
Editorial in this issue, one is reminded of one of the great
writers and humanists of the last century, Stefan Zweig. Already
in 1930, in his book Mental Healers (German original Die Heilung
durch den Geist) he described the dehumanization in medicine
and stressed the power of language in healing processes. We
warmly recommend this book as a guide to finding the lost
values of the spiritual and ethical heritage of human civilization.
We intend to publish the introduction to this book by Stefan
Zweig in one of the next issues of the NEL.
Professor Marek Pawlikowski is one of the living examples
of the above mentioned indivisibility of science and art,
ethical and spiritual values and the uncompromising integrity
of a scientist and a physician. We strongly recommend his
poetry published in French in the October issue of the NEL
2001.
In
this issue you also will find a beautiful photography by our
Deputy Chief Editor, Professor Michal Karasek, who besides
being a great scientist is a brilliant photographer.
We
encourage our distinguished readers, irrespective of their
scientific speciality and orientation, to submit their writings,
paintings, photography, philosophical thoughts, etc. - their
ART - to the Neuroendocrinology Letters for publication.
Lili
Maas, Art & Advertising Director
Director of the Editorial Office
